Monday, October 29, 2007

Steve picked up several Gravelys from a local guy. He was pretty excited about them, and got one working on Saturday.

While hanging out laundry Saturday morning, I looked down and saw a little field mouse nibbling on something right by my foot. I grabbed the closest thing I could find to put it in, which was an empty cat litter pan. I scooped up the mouse in the pan – it didn’t even try to run away! It just so happened that the neighbors came by at that time with their kids, so everybody got to see the mouse. The kids wanted to take it home for a pet, but Natalie (the mom) said no. After the neighbors left, we decided to give the mouse to the chickens. We put the whole pan in the chicken tractor and left the tractor lid open so we could watch. The girls got very excited, but didn’t seem to know what to do with it. Hazel pecked it a few times, sending it running around the pan. Oliver saw what was happening and climbed into the chicken tractor. He helped himself to ‘playtime’ with the mouse. It actually played dead until he whacked it around some. The chickens freaked out over the cat being in their tractor, so we took the pan with the cat and the mouse out and set it in the yard. Oliver proceeded to torture the mouse. Eventually he flung it into the yard where he played with it for a few minutes before it managed to escape.

Saturday night we went to the annual pumpkin carving party at Emily & Jeff’s house. We got to see many people who we haven’t seen in a while. Steve carved a couple of pumpkins, and I carved a birdhouse gourd. I couldn’t believe how hard the gourd was. It’s nothing like a pumpkin.

We made a run to Costco Sunday morning while we were in SL and spent way too much money. Then we picked up a dishwasher at Lowes. We don’t have it hooked up yet, but hopefully Steve will get it done soon.

When we got back to BH last night, we could see that we had frost Saturday night. The gourd and pumpkin leaves are all black and shriveled. We picked all the tomatoes that had begun to turn red and put a tarp over the main patch last night. There are still lots of green ones, and it’s supposed to warm up for the rest of this week, so we’ll save as many as we can.